


772

by themorninglark



Category: Free!
Genre: "Rock", Day 4, M/M, long distance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 14:23:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3253043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/themorninglark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not that they have less to say to each other, the longer they’re apart. They have more. They have so much more. </p><p>It’s just that everything they have to say needs to be said in person.</p>
            </blockquote>





	772

**Author's Note:**

> Written for SouRin Week 2015.
> 
> Prompt: Day 4/Rock/Long Distance

When Rin stands at Bondi Beach and looks out at the Tasman Sea, he thinks of his friends in Iwatobi, and of Sousuke.

He thinks that maybe Haru would get a kick out of the fact that the waters of the Pacific Ocean eventually flow all the way down here, that it’s the same view they’re looking at, the same endless horizon of blue.

He thinks that if he squints hard enough and looks into the distance, he might be able to see Sousuke running down that well-trodden path in their hometown, standing tall and proud against the sunset, the wind in his hair and a smile on his face.

(Rin knows he’s facing the wrong direction for that, but what does geography matter anyway?)

He draws pictures in the sand that get washed away by the tide. He likes to think that they’re riding on the waves, across the miles, to a shore somewhere in Japan where his friends will see them one day.

He tries to put all these feelings into words for letters back home. But it’s hard.

In the end, he only writes to one person, the person he knows will understand him without even trying.

 

* * *

 

_Rin,_

_I got your letter! And your photos._

_The dog is too damn cute. She’s still a puppy? She’ll grow bigger for sure._

_Things are fine here. I took Gou to the mall for ice cream the other day. It’s too cold for ice cream where you are now, eh?_

_I’m swimming every day and training hard. So you’d better wait for me when you get to that world stage. I’m gonna be in that lane next to yours. Just watch and see!_

_You were always better at English than everyone else in our class. Not that that’s saying much, but don’t let them get to you. You got this. You’re the strongest person I know, Rin._

_Sousuke_

 

* * *

 

Even when the letters stop, when Rin becomes too ashamed to write any more of them, when he hits the wall and falls back, _back_ , with a resounding thud, looking up at a sky so high he can't imagine where it ends -

Even when everything goes silent, Rin never forgets.

It's not that he doesn't try. But sometimes, he's just randomly wasting time online, looking at Japanese news sites because he misses home, and he'll catch a glimpse of a brief news headline in the sidebar that he can't unsee.

 _Yamazaki clinches gold at nationals_  
 _Yamazaki: Japan's next butterfly superstar?  
_ _Japan's new generation of swimmers: Yamazaki and…_

Rin always closes the tab at that point; he doesn't want to see who's being mentioned in the same breath as Sousuke, if it's not him.

It should be him. It should be him, dammit.

Yamazaki and Matsuoka, or no one else.

 

* * *

 

_Rin -_

_What with one thing and another on the first day of school... I forgot to ask for your phone number. I hope it hasn't changed._

_If you're reading this text, I'm waiting at the courtyard for you right now._

_We should catch up._

 

* * *

 

It’s not till months later that it occurs to Rin:

There’s something cruel about a universe that brings them back together only because one of them is broken.

 _This is a fucking joke, isn’t it?_  he thinks, in the middle of the night, in a hotel room in Tokyo after their last relay race together.

He casts a glance over at the other bed, where Sousuke’s back is turned to him. The covers move with the gentle rhythm of his breathing. Rin fixes the moonlit image in his mind, memorising the curve of Sousuke’s neck, his arm carelessly flung over the blanket, his good shoulder, the way his hair sticks out everywhere on the pillow.

_Would you have come back to find me if you hadn’t hurt yourself?_

_Would you have held out, for a reunion on the world stage?_

Sousuke always calls him the sentimental one, but Rin knows the truth of what drew them together in the first place.

Romantic dreams and visions, both as outrageous as the other’s.

Nothing is too big for the two of them. Not even the world.

 

* * *

 

_Rin,_

_Here’s your jacket. Good thing it has your name stitched on the inside. The Samezuka lost and found has so many jackets. I hope you didn’t leave anything else in our dorm room because you’re sure as hell not going to find it at lost and found. It’s like a warehouse bargain bin._

_Since there was space in this parcel for more stuff, I tossed in some of those granola bars you really like._

_And while I’m writing you an actual note on paper, I guess I might as well mention that I’m seeing a new physio next week. By the time you get this I’ll probably have seen him. You can ask me how it went then._

_Sousuke_

 

* * *

 

Rin can’t see his jacket because there are so damn many granola bars in this parcel.

He opens it up and granola bars spill out the side. Apple cinnamon bars. Strawberry bars. Chocolate bars. Honey bars. Roasted almond bars. It’s a mountain of bars. It’s a granolabarapalooza. It's an orgy of oaty goodness. There’s no empty space in the box at all. Every crevice, every fold in between the jacket, has been stuffed with a bar of a different flavour.

Rin eventually tips the whole box upside down, retrieves his jacket, finds another bar in its front pocket and rips open the envelope sitting right on the bottom of the whole shebang, which informs him that Sousuke apparently can’t tell the difference between ‘some’ and ‘a whole fucking lot’.

 _Oh, that’s funny,_ thinks Rin, bitterly. _That’s how it all started in the first place with your shoulder, isn’t it? You dumbass. You and your overdoing everything._

He hears a footstep outside and a click in the front door knob, signalling his roommate’s return.

He gets up and runs to the bathroom before anyone can see the glistening streak on his cheek streaming down from his eye.

_Well, fuck this. Fuck everything about this. Fuck crying over granola bars. Sousuke, are you trying to kill me?_

 

* * *

 

_Rin,_

_I scanned my rehab regime, since you said you wanted a look. Here it is._

_The doctor says I shouldn’t travel for a while since it’ll set back my recovery if I miss sessions._

_I'm sorry, you'll have to survive Christmas without me somehow._

_Sousuke_

 

* * *

 

Rin prints off Sousuke’s attachment and pins it up on the corkboard next to his bed. He circles the days that he knows will be exhausting, and highlights the days with light activity. He compares it with his own university timetable, pencils in Skype chats and sends Sousuke a meticulous schedule.

Not two minutes later, his inbox pings with a one-liner.

_You’re way too organised. What makes you think I’m so free at these times._

Rin sends Sousuke a picture of his middle finger as an attachment to a wordless email in reply.

 

* * *

 

He stacks the granola bars up neatly on his desk and eats one every Wednesday, after his early morning trainings, when there’s no time to eat anything else between the pool and the lecture theatre.

His roommate asks him how he’s making them last, because if _he_ had food on his desk like that, he’d just be stuffing his face every time he sits down to study.

Rin tells him that as a pro athlete, he has a fuckton of willpower and that’s that.

 

* * *

 

_Rin,_

_Tachibana and Nanase were in town over the weekend. Nanase had a competition. I went to watch. He’s doing well. They both say hi._

_Nanase is smiling a lot more now. I’m still not sure I like the little fucker but even I have to admit his personality has improved about 200%. Don’t know if it’s love or swimming. Maybe both._

_I hope you’re smiling more too, these days._

_(Don’t cry without me around. No one else will understand.)_

_Sousuke_

_p.s. Tachibana made us take a photo.  
_ _Attachment: youshouldphotoshopyourselfin.jpg_

 

* * *

 

Two months later, Rin’s still got more than half the pile left.

Sometimes he breaks a bar into two, and eats half in the morning and half at night instead, so it’ll last him the whole day.

Sometimes, he's so pissed off with the timezones and the distance that he eats two whole bars at one go and then gets mad with himself.

Two hours isn't that bad. It could be worse. He could be halfway across the world, somewhere like New York, and then he'd be fourteen hours away and really fuck  _that_ ; but even so -

Two hours is the difference between eleven o'clock and one in the morning, the difference between a decent time to still be up, and a time when he should really have been in bed an hour ago.

 

* * *

 

_Rin -_

_When are you coming back?_

 

* * *

 

The truth is, it’s not enough.

Ten thousand granola bars wouldn’t be enough, because it’s still a finite number, and that means one day he’ll run out.

That’s what Rin hates the most, in his history with Sousuke; that in the end everything is a countdown. Counting down to his last day in Sano Elementary. Counting down to their last race together. Counting down to their final hours at Samezuka, counting down to the moment when Rin stepped through the gates to board JAL Flight 771, turned around, and couldn’t hear Sousuke any longer, only saw him mouthing silent words behind the glass with an upraised hand.

Everything has to hit zero one day, and zero means goodbye.

It’s never enough.

 

* * *

 

_Don’t count down, then._

_Count up._

_This is day one._

 

* * *

 

Emails, texts and chat messages get shorter - more brusque - the longer they’re apart, and for all the unconventional reasons, like it always is with them. Rin and Sousuke, taking on the world, then turning it upside down and kicking its ass for good measure.

You can’t send a fistbump over the internet. Sending pictures, or doing it through a webcam, isn’t quite the same. It’s the touch that Rin misses, that he _craves_ , the tactile feel of Sousuke’s rough knuckles on his own, firm and resolute and warm. Every fistbump is a promise, every promise a silent trove of unspoken words.

Touch, and sound, not the sound of Sousuke's voice coming over Skype to his ears, but the sounds of Sousuke just doing stupid Sousuke things every day. Humming under his breath to his music, moving about on the top bunk, muttering a swearword under his breath if he gets up too fast and hits the metal headboard with a resounding clang.

Rin always tells him his head is so hard that the headboard's surely in more pain here.

Sousuke always gives him a world-weary look and disappears to the bathroom down the corridor, shutting the door behind him with a creak and a bang that’s uniquely _theirs_ ; nobody else’s door creaks that way.

These are the sounds you can't put in words.

 

* * *

 

_772? I got it._

 

* * *

 

It’s not that they have less to say to each other, the longer they’re apart. They have more. They have so much more.

It’s just that everything they have to say needs to be said in person.

 

* * *

 

_Good news, I managed to borrow a car._

_Bad news, it's small and has negative boot space so you'd better not have a ton of stuff. Leave the weights behind, thanks._

 

* * *

 

772 is the JAL flight number that will bring Rin back. He notes it down in his diary and circles the date in red. He writes down the digits large and clear in a thick black marker that leaves marks on the page beneath. _Seven-seven-two._

Rin is good at math, and that means he has a brain that breathes in numbers like oxygen, that sees patterns everywhere. _Seven times seven is forty-nine, and if you add two to that, you get fifty-one._

Today is day one. No zeroes in this count-up, no goodbyes, just hello hello _hello_

The word nearly spills out of his mouth in the middle of class, as he practises the sound of it in his head, over and over again, to a memory of black hair and turquoise eyes that’s so near yet so far.

772 is 771+1, only one more than the flight that takes him away.

771 turns into 772 with barely a breath.

Perhaps someone at JAL's trying to tell him that there's a hello just on the other side of every goodbye.

 

* * *

 

_Hey, can you bring me back some macadamia nuts. The ones in Australia taste way better._

_Are you counting up? It's day twenty-six._

 

* * *

 

On day fifty, while packing his room and his suitcase for home, Rin finds an old letter, yellowed round the edges, sitting at the bottom of a drawer.

He hadn’t brought it back to Iwatobi with him, at first. He’d left it behind at Russell and Lori’s house, along with a box of other things. All part of his old life, all things he’d wanted to walk away from, at that time.

A swimming cap that’s faded now, sunshine yellow turning into old, dusty sepia. A pair of goggles that’s a few sizes too small. Photographs of his friends from Iwatobi SC. Photographs of him and Sousuke. Letters he’d written but never sent. Letters he’d received.

They’d kept it all these years, and delivered it to his dorm room when he returned.

“It just felt wrong to throw them out,” Lori had said, with a smile. “We knew you’d come back someday.”

Rin blows the dust off the envelope. He opens it, and takes out the sheet of paper inside.

He reads it once. Twice.

He reads it until he has memorised it, and he reads it again.

Right at the end of the letter, it says: _You’re the strongest person I know, Rin_.

Rin takes a picture of that line on his phone and sends it to Sousuke with the message _no, you are, dumbass. wanna fight about it? let’s have a showdown tomorrow._

 

* * *

 

_Hell yeah._

_I’ll be ready to fight at the airport. Winner gets a can of Coke._

 

* * *

 

I don’t want your stupid Coke, thinks Rin, looking down at the text.

I’ll tell you what I really want, face to face.

You’d better be ready, Sousuke.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I really wanted to do something for SouRin Week. I don't write these two often. This seemed like a good opportunity. 
> 
> And the more I do write them, the more I'm honestly convinced that Sousuke and Rin might just be the two most hopeless romantics in _Free!_.
> 
> Thank you for reading ♥ hope you enjoyed it as much as I did writing it!
> 
> find me on [tumblr](http://themorninglark.tumblr.com/) | [@larkephemera on twitter](https://twitter.com/larkephemera)


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